This World Is A Black Hole

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The Emigrants by W. G. Sebald

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I'm at a loss for words. How do you “review” a human life?

There are a multitude of lives packed inside this book—stories within stories that have been swept under rugs, scattered amongst ephemera, crumpled in the back of desk drawers, scrawled in notebooks and journals, buried in the dust of architecture. Despite the novel's focus on four individuals, each life becomes a window into a thousand more. Victims of war and genocide do not exist in a vacuum after all; their stories and their pain are passed down through generations. Despite the displaced survivor's best attempt to compartmentalize the trauma and start fresh in new countries, those painful memories are carried with them, and they seep through the cracks, often resulting in illness and suicide further down the familial chain than you might expect. But these things aren't talked about within the families experiencing them. Talking about them would make them real, so as with his debut novel, Vertigo, Sebald’s primary objective with The Emigrants seems to be to give shape to those things left unsaid by paying careful attention to the details of what was; he reconstructs the lives of these emigrants by talking to their family members, looking at photographs, reading their journal entries, and tracing their geographical steps. From modern-day America to war-torn Europe, all the way back to Jerusalem, where spirituality and decay coexist in staggering contrast, we follow this river of time, memory, and lineage in an attempt to trace generational trauma back to its root, but as we get closer to penetrating that web of memory, the image often becomes more ambiguous.

The Emigrants is haunting, beautiful, and immensely clever, easily one of the best books I've read all year. Sebald does have a way of droning on like a grandparent recounting in meticulous detail the events of their youth, but if you listen closely, you can see a cathedral beginning to take shape; the stories begin to take on a mystical quality, and those memories become real, visceral, and present; we begin to embody them as if they were our own—because they are our own.

I leave you with a few choice quotes:

"Memory, he added in a postscript, often strikes me as a kind of dumbness. It makes the head heavy and giddy, as if one were not looking back down the receding perspectives of time but rather down on the earth from a great height, from one of those towers whose tops are lost to view in the clouds." (p. 145)

Crapalachia by Scott McClanahan

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VOICE is such an underrated aspect of writing. I think anyone can learn to write in a specific style or utilize specific vocabulary to great effect, but truly embodying one's own voice through the page seems to be a rare gift reserved for poets and playwrights—those who utilize their arms and their lungs just as much as their brains. I only recently discovered McClanahan through a video of him reading a passage from his newest (and yet unreleased) novel, Fights!, but I was immediately hooked by his voice, by the confidence of his delivery, and by his ability to convey the intrinsic humour of humanity with the tender precision of a spitball blown through a straw.

That voice is fully embodied here in Crapalachia. Whether recounting stories of his histrionic Grandma Ruby taking photographs of dead people or of himself having to clean shit off the floor while helping his disabled Uncle Nathan use the bathroom, McClanahan sings like a canary in a coal mine. Crapalachia is very much a love letter to a time and a place and a deeply humanizing portrait of the people in it—people who the coastal middle classes would slander as hillbillies or rednecks. McClanahan brings these people to life in all of their ugly beauty, and I think the reason he is able to pull this off without coming across as patronizing is because these are his people; these are his memories, his family members (albeit reimagined and fictionalized), and they are embodied in his voice just as his voice is now embodied on the page.

What is more beautiful than that?

A Shining by Jon Fosse

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Perhaps reading A Shining directly after Morning and Evening wasn't the right move. Both novellas explore the same idea that our consciousness may very well steamroll its way straight through death without even noticing that the body has perished, but A Shining takes a much more concise and direct approach that I found overall less interesting or evocative. But don't get it twisted; this was still a great read, and while the ideas are similar, their expression is quite different.

In A Shining, we find our narrator driving at random down roads that eventually lead him to a dark forest where his car gets stuck in a rut. Realizing that the last house he passed was miles back down the road and looked to be abandoned anyways, he decides to follow a path through the forest where he quickly gets lost and a bunch of surreal shit begins to ensue.

The metaphors for life are fairly obvious, but I loved the unsettling and claustrophobic atmosphere that Fosse was able to build with them. As our narrator tries to navigate this forest, he runs into ghosts and struggles against fatigue and decision paralysis. A Shining seems to espouse this idea that even in the dark forest of life where progress feels inert, movement and human connection are paramount to survival. It was a much-needed reminder that it does not matter so much which direction you move in so long as you keep moving, even if only to stay warm. And hug your parents, goddammit; they might need the love more than you do.

Morning and Evening by Jon Fosse

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What do you think happens when you die? Like, assuming that your consciousness is a self-contained capsule of memory and awareness that can exist outside of your corporeal form (one might even call it the "spirit"), do you think that it (you) will even notice when it is separated from the body? Or will it simply continue on without a hitch? One thing seems certain: without any new input, your consciousness will likely trigger a feedback loop and generate some strange conglomerate of past memories that will be recontextualized into new experiences (almost exactly like generative AI), but this could only go on for so long until your consciousness becomes aware that something feels off.

Personally, this idea terrifies me, and there is indeed an unmistakable sense of cosmic dread that runs through this novella, but Fosse has managed to create a compelling vision of how imperceptible the veil between life and death might be while also making an equally compelling case for the intrinsic beauty of life in every stage of its cycle. It is through this process of the consciousness coming to terms with its own fate that Morning and Evening proves how a certain level of discomfort is absolutely necessary to experience any sort of joy in life, and by the end of that process, all I could do was cry.

Blackshirts & Reds: Rational Fascism & the Overthrow of Communism by Michael Parenti

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I used to think politics had nothing to do with me, but something changed as I got older and started consuming fiction: I began to notice the pattern of politics, economics, environment, and class as being inextricable forces that shaped the lives and worlds of the characters I was reading about. The more I read, the less I could see a separation between myself and the politico-economic systems that shape our material realities, and the more I became obsessed with this idea of interconnectivity, which sparked a train of self-education that eventually led me to Michael Parenti.

Blackshirts & Reds makes one thing clear: from the Industrial Revolution to the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany, to the new age of American imperialism, to the increase in social division, the atomization of culture, the hijacking of "democracy," and the current economic and environmental crises we are facing, one thing is at the center of it all: capitalist greed. Parenti does an amazing job at illustrating how these systems of capitalism and fascism collude, accelerate, and destroy everything in their path, but he also makes another thing painfully clear: almost every critique of communism (aka the biggest existential threat to capitalism) is completely rife with hypocrisy and ignorance, and that is by design—the direct result of decades of anti-communist propaganda and misinformation campaigns.

Look, I'm not here to tell you what to believe or convince you that communists are infallible angels, but I want to encourage you to think critically about why Western capitalists would put so much time and energy into undermining a system of governance that was only ever trying to provide a basic standard of living for its populace, free from opportunistic parasites looking to get rich off of the labour of others—a system that was never even given the chance to reach its apogee because the threat that it posed to capitalist society put it under constant attack. Maybe it's because there is no profit in loving thy neighbour.

Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson

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A queer coming-of-age story based on loose fragments of ancient Greek poetry penned by Stesichorus (630–555 BC) about Herakles and the monster Geryon? Sign me up.

I honestly didn’t know what I was getting into when I picked this up; I have experience in neither poetry nor Greek mythology, but thankfully Carson’s reimagining (or renovation) of this ancient myth doesn’t really require knowledge of either to enjoy. Autobiography of Red blurs the lines between classicism and modernity and offers an easily approachable spin on narrative verse. Yes, Hades is an actual location in the novel, but so is Buenos Aires and Huaraz. There are airplanes and fast cars and towns built into the slopes of active volcanoes, and yes, Geryon has wings and can fly, but he is also just a moody, confused kid who is really into expressing himself through photography. And Autobiography of Red feels very much like a collection of snapshots—each short chapter starts with a single line that sets the scene, and then Carson goes to work with her visceral, multilayered prose to paint heartrending scenes of distance, insecurity, and tenderness. Instead of Herakles killing Geryon with an arrow to the skull as in Stesichorus’s poem, he kills him with emotional indifference, but this indifference leads to a sort of awakening in Geryon as he learns to embrace his true form as a beautiful, flying red monster.

Upon completion I wasn’t sure how much the verse structure actually added to the experience, especially considering Carson doesn’t follow any rhyme scheme or metering device, but I think the line breaks really helped me to slow down, and focus on the rhythm of each word—something I might not have done if everything was condensed into simple paragraphs. Either way, this story is packed with allegory and hidden meanings, and I really enjoyed how Carson was able to create such a potent sense of feeling and environmental pressure with so few words. This story might take multiple reads to fully unpack, but I look forward to doing so.

Midnight Is Not In Everyone’s Reach by António Lobo Antunes

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The best art is often times the art that challenges your perceptions and forces you to meet the artist halfway. In the realm of music I have often developed Stockholm syndrome in my attempts to grapple with perplexing styles, and through that effort I have turned many albums from ear antagonists into lifelong friends. The same can be said about books.

I say this because as much as I ended up loving Midnight Is Not In Everyone's Reach upon completion, I cannot understate the challenge I faced in getting there.

The narrative form of this book is very experimental and surreal. It reads more like fragmented shards of poetry than a cogent story. In short, it is about a woman who returns to her childhood beach house to say goodbye to the ghosts of her family before following the path of her older brother who committed suicide, and just like the narrator in Juan Rulfo's Pedro Paramo, she becomes consumed by lingering memories that interject and overlap, causing past and present conversations to weave themselves into a dizzying collage, and the novel quickly becomes less about a singular protagonist and more of an intimate portrait of familial trauma and grief.

Sounds cool, I know, but this non-linearity of events becomes a deterrent, as if the form of the novel itself were a trauma response set in place to safeguard those memories from surfacing. Even on a sentence-by-sentence basis the words often assemble themselves in nonsensical strings of (perceived) non-meaning, which caused me to repeatedly question what this book could possibly tell me that was worth the effort of prying it open, but what kept me going through those moments of doubt was Antunes's careful repetition of motifs to string together fragments of memory into distinct profiles of emotion and character. What appeared nonsensical and formless at first began to reveal its structure, like a free jazz ensemble, which is purposely obtuse but clearly the result of skilled musicianship and collective harmony—a beautiful thing in and of itself.

May 11th, 2026

Being cheeky/using up the last couple shots on the roll outside of the photo lab.

The Walls Are Closing In On Us by Joshua Trent Brown

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I don't think I've ever cried more during a book than I did while reading The Walls Are Closing In On Us. Aside from the fact that the story is full of tragedy, my reading of it also coincided with a moment in my life where I had already been reflecting on my own experience of boyhood—trying to trace my finger back to the moment when that boy inside of me was suffocated and hollowed out, and trying to figure out why I put so much distance between myself and him, to the point where sometimes I doubt that any innocent part of me ever existed. Where did these walls come from that I erect both within and outside myself? Did the world put them there, or did I? Maybe it was a collaborative effort.

Watching George (the protagonist of the novel) go through that same experience—coming of age in a world full of dehumanizing hatred and watching that world become reflected through his eyes and his actions until he became an alien to himself with no home or identity to call his own—just hit me way harder than I expected. I never grew up in the American South or experienced a fraction of the racism that George does throughout this novel, but as a mixed kid myself, I know what it is like to see yourself differently than the world sees you, to feel like you exist in two places at once, and to have to come to terms with that. I thought that feeling of separation was explored beautifully not only throughout the story but also through the structure of the narrative itself, which is told in a series of flashbacks as George weaves in and out of consciousness, quite literally in limbo, bleeding out on the forest floor and having to contend with the choices both in and out of his control that wound him up there.

Roman Candle UNADULTERATED

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FFO: EMOTIONAL HARDCORE / LISTEN

A Touché Amoré fan and a 7 Angels 7 Plagues fan walk into a bar, and the bartender asks them, "What is your favourite Ebullition-era screamo band?" The following conversation is how I imagine the creative process for this record went. Roman Candle's debut EP was already on the aggressive side of emo, but with UNADULTERATED, the band has doubled down on their hardcore influence and unleashed a new version of themselves that is more vitriolic than ever before, and rightly so given the themes of domestic abuse, survivor's guilt, and bloody revenge that are conveyed through vocalist Piper Ferrari's lyrics. "Blasphemous Act" makes clear this new heaviness with a running count of four open string breakdowns that get progressively stupider (non-derogatory), and the panic-chord attack during "Fire In The Night Sky Forever" only seals the deal, but the band has not gone full on metalcore here, and most of their riffs still weave a fine balance between bouncy pull-offs and driving minor-key melodies that open up into more wind-swept moments of catharsis or reflective spoken word sections.

High-Rise (1975) by J. G. Ballard

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The last (and first) Ballard I read was The Drowned World—an imperfect novel in many ways, but one with a sensory atmosphere that I'll never forget. The humidity, the bugs, the lizards, the jungle flora, the old towers reaching out of the murky water into the glint of a blinding sun, and the ancient memories hidden in their flooded depths, I remember it all so vividly. Ballard's sense of place is just so visceral, but he is specifically good at crafting tight-knit dialectic environments that are layered vertically rather than horizontally, often extending beyond the physical realm into the cerebral.

Ballard's characters become reflections of their environment just as much as their environment becomes a reflection of them, and in High-Rise, he really narrowed in on this concept by creating a gigantic concrete pressure cooker for people to go insane in. That is literally the plot of the book. The last tenant moves in, the forty-story apartment building hits critical mass, and tension begins to rise out of thin air. Subtle acts of aggression (the kind any urban commuter is familiar with) quickly escalate into dead pets, ransacked apartments, broken elevators, and power outages, and next thing you know, the entire building is engaged in tribal warfare for no real reason other than instinct.

As society in the tower breaks down, the exterior of the building also reflects the inner chaos—garbage and bodily excrement are readily flung from the balcony, smashing the windows of cars below and streaming the concrete walls with piss, but the residents in turn feed off of the filth, wallowing in it until they become animals again, devolving into primal hierarchies built upon violence and territorial control all while trying to hide their total collapse from outside authority, as if their lawless disorder is something sacred to protect. It's a wild ride, and at the center of it all is the psychological probing of three characters from different levels of the apartment as they either crack or harden under the pressure of the building.

How I Killed The Universal Man by Thomas Kendall

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How I Killed The Universal Man both met and completely subverted my expectations. I was prepared for a Dickian sci-fi novel about pervasive tech and experimental drugs in a not-so-distant hypercapitalist future, but I was met with something much stranger and, ultimately, more human. Kendall draws you in with the story of Lakerman, a burnout journalist working on a gonzo piece about a new antidepressant called Noumenon and its head researcher who has mysteriously vanished, but as Lakerman signs up for the pharmaceutical trial and becomes inundated with chemicals and biological implants, Kendall yanks the sink plug, and the narrative begins to spiral rapidly downwards through several layers of virtual and hallucinatory abstractions.

As Lakerman follows his leads, he is led toward a virtual reality "game" that supposedly holds the secret to the researcher's disappearance, and as he immerses himself in this game, in combination with all of the drugs and booze circulating his system, it becomes increasingly difficult to tell what is real and what is not. I absolutely loved this about the story. Kendall does this thing in the later half of the novel where he starts throwing dialog options onto the page during conversations as if the reader were playing a Bethesda RPG, and this could easily be seen as a gimmick, but it actually serves an important function of grounding the reader. When it became nigh impossible to see the distinction between reality and non-reality, those dialog options and the illusion of choice they represented reminded me that Lakerman was still in a simulation and brought me a strange sense of comfort, as if the absence of free will somehow lifted the weight of my responsibility as a reader.

Koyo Would You Miss It?

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FFO: MELODIC HARDCORE, POP PUNK, EMO / LISTEN

Would You Miss It? is an album that took nearly three years to sink its teeth into me, but now I'm firmly in its grip, spinning it upwards of eight times a day just to make it to the weekend with a shred of optimism left in my soul, and it works; it hits the spot; it makes me feel like life might just be worth sticking around for. As I approach my mid-thirties and my music taste continues to funnel itself towards the valley of melodic hooks and sick-ass palm mutes, life-affirming bands like Koyo and Stand Still just start hitting harder and more often. Long Island must have lithium in the water. But Would You Miss It? doesn't simply check the right genre boxes for me; it fuses them together in such a synergistic way that no amount of sappiness ever feels like it weighs down the energy packed behind it, and no amount of power chord chugging ever overwhelms the emotional catharsis of Joey Chiaramont's rugged voice or the melodic leads that propel him forward. Koyo is leaning mass-forward at all times, but the way the group manages to maintain such momentum while making sure each song still feels cared for and structurally distinct is where the band truly achieves its mark of quality. Just check the trio run of "I Might Not" into "Anthem" for a good taste of Koyo's versatility and unrelenting catchiness.

April 28, 2026

Rocannon’s World by Ursula K. Le Guin

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I am a huge advocate for always keeping some vintage science/fantasy paperbacks in your TBR stack as a way to replenish your whimsymeter in between postmodern anguish simulations. Embracing the pure joy of imagination and storytelling is the best ward against all sorts of reading slumps, mumps, bumps, and lumps, and I can't think of a better author to fulfill that role than Le Guin. Not only will she refill your whimsymeter, she will stimulate your brain and satisfy your soul at the same time. Even in her first published novel, she was writing with a level of intelligence and empathy that far outweighed most of her peers. Rocannon’s World may be her pulpiest, most quest-driven novel (perhaps apart from Earthsea, which I haven't read), full of swords, mystical beings, and giant cats with fucking WINGS, but it is also surprisingly complex and full of all the little sociological and technological details that you would expect from a Le Guin novel.

I also can't think of a better novel to represent the synthesis of science and fantasy than this one. On the surface of Fomalhaut II, the various tribes and races live culturally rich but technologically primitive lives, but then with the arrival of Rocannon, a peaceful ethnographer from the Interstellar League who shows up in a space ship, all of a sudden future tech and the mechanics of time dilation get thrown into the mix which results in some interesting timeline interactions. But Rocannon's ship and crewmates are then destroyed by a rival league who would see to dominate the planet instead of understand it, and Rocannon must work with the tribes of the world he is studying to help them quell the threat and regain sovereignty. I absolutely love how, despite the clear line between good and evil here, Le Guin doesn't allow this quest to be morally black and white, and the ending still left me conflicted and questioning the idea of violent intervention.